Bill Clinton said Monday that he had no interest in wading into “that little spat” that broke out last week between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama over whether the next president should commit to meeting with the leader of several U.S. adversaries.

Then, in the next sentence, the former president waded right in -- in a way that sounded like the Clintons might be seeking a truce with Obama in the debate over the proper role of presidential diplomacy when dealing with assorted bad guys on the world stage.

While Hillary Clinton and her team pounced on Obama’s pledge to meet with leaders of such countries as Iran, Syria and Cuba as “naïve,” her husband took pains in a speech to centrist Democrats to emphasize that all the candidates basically agree on the big picture.

“We have to get back to more diplomacy,” Clinton said, adding, “I’ve heard no fewer than four of our candidates say in the last month, remind us that in the middle of the cold war, in the darkest hours, we never stopped talking to the Soviets at some level. So no one disputes that.

Advisers to both Bill and Hillary Clinton bridled at an early version of this story, which stated that the 42nd president’s remarks might be a sign that Obama had succeeded in his pushback last week against Hillary Clinton. In response to her criticism that it was “irresponsible” to give the foreign leaders a propaganda victory by meeting with a U.S. president without forcing concessions in advance, Obama said Clinton sounded like President Bush in refusing to practice diplomacy with adversaries.

Bill Clinton, according to an aide, was speaking extemporaneously about the Obama controversy, trying to strike a conciliatory tone but not with a message coordinated through his wife’s campaign.

In his Nashville remarks, Clinton said people could interpret the candidates’ answers for themselves but indicated he did not see much disagreement on “the big question, and that is: Should we have more diplomacy? The answer is yes. Then you can parse their answers to the specific questions and decide who you think is right.”

In his speech in Nashville to the Democratic Leadership Council, a group of moderate Democrats he once headed and that served as a launching pad for his 1992 campaign, Clinton mostly avoided overt references to 2008 politics. While his wife and other 2008 candidates stayed away from this year’s conference, Clinton lavished praise on the group and said the DLC remains relevant to helping the party come up with new ideas.

In what might be a sign that Democratic candidate John Edwards is getting on Clinton’s nerves -- though he did not mention Edwards by name -- Clinton said it “galls” him that fighting poverty is now seen as a voguish issue, and that people assume he and the DLC cared only about the middle class and not the poor.

Edwards has made fighting poverty a centerpiece of his campaign. Clinton said his administration, using DLC ideas such as the earned income tax credit, deserve credit for tackling the issue.

“The only way you can expand the middle class is to move poor people into it -- unless you are trying to make the rich poor,” Clinton said, adding, “We had the most successful antipoverty program in a generation and it still works.”